Posted
by
kdawson
on Friday December 18, 2009 @12:29PM
from the taking-care-of-business dept.

joabj writes "While MySQL is the subject of much high-profile wrangling between the EU and Oracle (and the MySQL creator himself), the MySQL developers have been quietly moving the widely-used database software forward. The new beta version of MySQL, the first publicly available, features such improvements as near-asynchronous replication and more options for partitioning. A new release model has been enacted as well, bequeathing this version the title of 'MySQL Server 5.5.0-m2.' Downloads here."

The last two times I tested it for a true shared-nothing HA cluster, NDBCLUSTER failed miserably without a lot of tweaking. The optimizer was buggy to the point of being broken. And basically the response I got from MySQL AB at the time was, "If you want to use NDBCLUSTER, you'd better get the Enterprise Support Package". After pricing out what it would cost in support from MySQL AB AND the cost of having to go through and rewrite a bunch of our code to optimize it, it was cheaper to buy DB2.

Company I work for now uses PostgreSQL for main product lines. But two of their package are third party and use MySQL including their billing system. It works, but as it stands right now, neither of those systems are being taxed on a Dual-Quad Core DB server with 12GB RAM. In fact, it barely runs at 5% of resource utilization. We still use MySQL for one of our website's CMS. And it does the job well.

MySQL works well up until you need more than one box. Replication can work in some circumstances, but as a HA solution, it looses any advantages it had in terms of cost vs. extremely proven and reliable systems.

Exactly! Especially since MySQL is already well known for both data loss and corruption in the name of performance. Made all the more embarrassing is that PostgreSQL consistently either meets or beats MySQL in performance and leaves it far behind in scalability. In short, PostgreSQL is literally the poster boy proving such an errant trend is bad for everyone.

At the end of the day, that's just MySQL marketing trying to explain why MySQL is inferior to PostgreSQL and other commercial offers. After all, bringing feature parity is lots of very, very, hard and complicated work. Best to simply not do it and market that as a pro rather than the con it is.